NEW DELHI, India – At a private event in November 2019, Sandeep Chakravorty, then the Indian consul general in New York, was caught on camera urging New Delhi to adopt the “Israeli model” in Indian-administered Kashmir.
At the time, millions of people in Kashmir were already reeling under a crippling military blockade and communications blackout. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu-majority government stripped the region of its semi-autonomous status months ago and imprisoned thousands of people, including the region’s political leaders, some of whom were pro-India.
A senior Indian diplomat was musing about Israel’s far-right settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories, referring to the resettlement of thousands of Kashmiri Hindus who had to flee their homeland in a 1989 exodus after an armed rebellion against Indian rule began in the Himalayan region.
“The same thing happened in the Middle East. If the people of Israel can do it, so can we,” Chakravorty told the gathering, adding that the Modi government was “determined” to do so.
Six years later, Chakravorty’s words ring truer than ever. As Prime Minister Modi prepares for his second visit to Israel, which begins on February 25, the two countries are bound by more than just friendship, trade and military partnership, and some analysts say they are increasingly working closely together on certain aspects of their governance models as well.
Under the Modi government, India has openly embraced Israel at the expense of its longstanding support for the Palestinian cause, analysts say. But they added that since Prime Minister Modi came to power in 2014, New Delhi also appears to have imported multiple elements of Israel’s security and administrative approach to the Palestinians and unleashed it on its domestic policies.
“Hostile subjects under occupation”
Analysts say a common ideological vision lies at the heart of these deepening ties.
Prime Minister Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has its roots in a Hindutva philosophy that seeks to transform India into a Hindu nation and a natural home for Hindus everywhere in the world, similar to how Israel sees itself as a homeland for Jews.
“The India-Israel relationship under Modi is a bond between two ideologies that see themselves as a civilizational project and Muslims as a demographic and security threat,” said Azad Essa, author of the 2023 book Hostile Homelands: The New Alliance Between India and Israel.
“The friendship works because they have similar supremacist goals,” Essa told Al Jazeera. “Under the Modi government, India and Israel became strategic partners, and Delhi began to see Israel as a template and key to India’s move towards great power status.”
One of the clearest examples of India borrowing money from Israel is Modi’s so-called “bulldozer justice” policy.
Over the past decade, authorities in several states ruled by the Bharatiya Janata Party have demolished the homes and shops of hundreds of Muslims and destroyed several mosques. These demolitions have, in most cases, been carried out without legal notices being issued to the occupiers or owners of the premises. They have typically followed religious tensions or protests against the Modi government’s policies in a particular region, and in some cases have followed local brawls with religious overtones.
Chief Minister of India’s largest state, Uttar Pradesh, Yogi Adityanath, one of the BJP’s top leaders, is now known as “Bulldozer Baba” (Papa Bulldozer) by his supporters.
This is straight out of Israeli strategy. Israel has demolished thousands of Palestinian homes in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, forcibly displacing residents and making way for illegal Israeli settlements. During Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza, nearly every home, office, hospital, school, university, and place of worship in the Palestinian territories was destroyed or severely damaged.
“Hindu nationalist belief systems are steeped in Zionism and affinity with Israel,” said Sumantra Bose, a political scientist whose research focuses on the intersection of nationalism and conflict in South Asia. “For generations [Rashtriya SwayamSevak Sangh, the ideological fountainhead of the BJP] Top officials, including Modi, have been indoctrinated with this ideology and imbibed a love for Israel. ”
He argued that the Israeli nation-state, which Bose characterized as majoritarian and supremacist, was the model practiced by Hindu nationalists in India during the Modi government. “Israeli ideals are reflected in many policies and measures of the Modi government.”
Muslims in India have faced various social boycotts in recent years. Renting a home has become increasingly difficult, Muslim children often face bullying and harassment at school, and most of the community has fled many villages following attacks.
In November 2024, India’s Supreme Court ruled that government authorities cannot demolish any property without due legal process, even if it belongs to people accused of a crime. However, demolition continues at the site.
Essa, author of Hostile Homelands, said both India and Israel use bulldozing of homes and land to “target and punish specific people and emphasize political messages to communities, including who belongs to the state and who is an outsider.”
The big shadow of security principles
At the forefront of the India-Israel bilateral relationship are the two countries’ defense ties and overlapping security principles. India is the largest buyer of Israeli weapons, spending billions of dollars on purchases.
India is also supplying weapons to Israel amid the ongoing genocidal war in Gaza. Israel provides Indian soldiers with joint training sessions with the Israeli army, as well as a wide range of Israeli systems, including UAVs, air defense systems, and advanced radar and surveillance technology.
But among supporters of the radical securitization of the Indian state, Israel has long had an appeal that extends far beyond its supply of advanced weapons.
After gunmen killed 26 civilians in the tourist town of Pahalgam in Indian-administered Kashmir on April 22, 2025, India bombed Pakistan and multiple locations in Pakistan-administered Kashmir, accusing Islamabad of being behind the tourist attack.
Pakistan denied any role in the four-day fierce air battle between its nuclear-armed neighbors, but fired missiles and drones in response.
During that period, debates and programs on several Indian television news channels were filled with references to Israel after the Kashmir attack. “April 22 is to India what October 7 is to Israelis,” anchor Arnab Goswami said, referring to the day in 2023 when Hamas fighters attacked southern Israel. A guest on the show said, “We are demanding that Pakistan be turned into Gaza.”
“We have to respond like Israel,” a former police officer in Indian-administered Kashmir told a Hindi newspaper.
The most controversial of Israel’s security exports to India is Pegasus, a sophisticated spyware developed by Israeli software company NSO Group.
Siddharth Varadarajan, co-founder of New Delhi-based nonprofit news website The Wire, was among the journalists targeted by spyware allegedly sold to the Modi government by an Israeli company under an undisclosed defense contract.
“[The Israeli spyware] They turn your iPhone into a personal spying device,” Varadarajan told Al Jazeera about his experience, adding that he could secretly record and send videos and photos.
“The Israeli model of using spyware to monitor areas of opposition and possible criticism is something that the Modi government has adopted and wholeheartedly embraces,” he said.
India’s Supreme Court appointed an expert committee to say that while malware was found on some phones, it could not conclusively attribute it to Pegasus, citing limited cooperation from the Modi government.
Varadarajan said that while some repressive ideas are not unique to Israel, the Indian government is “happy to adopt them.” Although India ranks among the top democracies in imposing internet restrictions, the country has fallen on several democracy indexes in recent years.
Referring to the pattern of overlap in India and Israel’s policies, Varadarajan said, “It is very unfortunate that the same methods used by the Israelis against the occupied people are also being used by the Modi government against its own people.”
“Treat residents like an outside threat”
Indeed, India has long struggled with a series of internal security challenges in an effort to unify and hold together a vast and diverse continent. The separatist movement extends from the northeast to Kashmir. In 1966, then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi ordered helicopter warships to bomb parts of the northeastern state of Mizoram to quell an insurgency.
Other regions, particularly India’s deep south, have long feared cultural dominance from the Hindi-speaking north, leading to sporadic conflicts over language and resources.
But in that context, “what Israel has done is helped India provide technology and expertise to become more repressive, authoritarian and militarized like Israel,” Essa told Al Jazeera. “And these techniques are comprehensive and treat the population as an external threat.”
Nowhere is this more evident than in Indian-administered Kashmir.
Kashmir, one of the most militarized regions in the world, has been stripped of its earlier semi-autonomous status since August 2019, as well as most of the regional democratic powers held by other state authorities. The Modi government’s move to end political dialogue and diplomatic engagement on the Kashmir issue also reflects Israel’s approach, said Bose, who is also a professor of international politics at India’s Clare University.
“This reflects Prime Minister Netanyahu’s approach of denial and non-engagement towards the Palestinians and exclusive reliance on military force,” he added.
Indeed, Kashmir and Palestine have very different pasts and present. Still, India’s approach to Kashmir increasingly bears similarities to Israel’s treatment of the West Bank, Essa said.
“There is a militarization, population control and legal system that allows both India and Israel to carry out their occupation and control people on a daily basis, from checkpoints to raids and communication blackouts,” Essa told Al Jazeera.
“Like the occupied West Bank, India maintains a near-permanent state of emergency in Kashmir, where military presence, surveillance, and extraordinary legal powers shape daily life,” he argued. “And, as in the West Bank, the day-to-day governance of Kashmir has been delegated to local administrators with limited real power.”
